Leading Czech antivirus vendor Avast! has updated its free antivirus tool to version 6. Avast! Free AntiVirus 6 claims to deliver even better protection against malware thanks to two new features previously only found in paid-for antivirus programs.

The first feature is AutoSandbox, which automatically identifies suspicious applications and prompts the user to run them in an isolated environment, preventing them from interacting with, and potentially infecting, the computer. Second, WebRep provides reputation-based ratings for websites and search engine results, although this functionality is already available for free in standalone browser add-ons like MyWOT, it's the first time it's been made available as part of a free antivirus product.

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The Web as a whole tends to favor those individuals with their vision intact.

There are a couple of areas of the Web that have benefitted the visually impaired: Web radio and podcasting services, for example, are generally free sources of lots of information, and many of the most popular news sites do daily or weekly audio recaps of their featured written content. Voice over IP communications, likewise has brought the convenience of free instant messaging to those without sight. But for the most part, the Web has been a silent place that we look at, instead of listen to.

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As if the press frenzy surrounding the antenna problems with the AT&T iPhone 4 last year was not enough, Consumer Reports has just added some more fuel to the fire. The publication claims that in its own internal tests of the Verizon model, the same exact attenuation issues are occurring.

Bloggers and journalists labeled it a whole bunch of amusing and comical names: from the "grip of death" to "Antennagate." It became a whole lot more serious for Apple, who eventually was forced by the publicity to admit some issues and provide free bumpers to all iPhone 4 owners.

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Once you've installed Service Pack 1 for Windows 7, did you know there's around 1GB of setup files cluttering up your hard disk? You'll need these files should you ever want to uninstall SP1, but we'd only recommend doing so if you needed to correct a problem. After a month or so, you should have a pretty good idea if these files will be needed going forward or not, at which point if your system is trouble-free, why not delete them to reclaim a decent amount of space?

Microsoft has thoughtfully integrated the cleaning tool into the Disk Cleanup utility, meaning you no longer need to open a command prompt window and type in a specific command. Once you've ascertained that you'd like to free up the drive space, read on to discover how it's done.

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German software developer ashampoo GmbH & Co. KG has released Ashampoo Photo Commander 9.0 for Windows PCs. Version 9 boasts a large number of new features to give Photo Commander a foothold in the increasingly crowded photo organization and editing market. This is reflected in the download size of the package, which is a third bigger than version 8 at a whopping 135MB.

Standout new features include support for tagging photos, new filters and editing options and improved wizards, plus an extended user interface, which includes a brand new dual-pane view for comparing the effects of editing on the currently selected photo.

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Betanews welcomes reader contributions. Here, Eric Neumann responds to two February 21st posts by Joe Wilcox -- "iPad is not a PC" and "5 reasons Macs will never outsell PCs." If you would like to submit a post, please email joewilcox at gmail dot com.

Being a business IT professional, I have been watching with great interest and excitement the emergence of the iOS model of computing and cloud movements hitting the personal and now commercial computing worlds. However, I must add that initially I have also viewed these big changes with fear; as recently as 2006, my career was purely based on the SME IT status quo of on-premise Microsoft and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stacks.

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Google took a big step Thursday night towards dealing with the issue of content farms clogging results, changing its algorithms to weed out low-quality sites. The company said the changes would "noticeably impact" 11.8 percent of all queries, and could affect the rankings for a large number of websites, the company warned.

"We can't make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down," the company posted to its blog. "It is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that's exactly what this change does."

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In the first month of 2011, Myspace CEO Mike Jones confirmed that News Corp was looking to spin off or sell his social media and entertainment site. According to reports on Friday, more than 20 parties have already expressed interest in MySpace.

Silicon Alley Insider on Thursday posted a chart concisely titled "The Utter Collapse of MySpace," which showed how the social-network-turned-entertainment-site dropped from 70 million unique views to 45 million uniques between 2010 and 2011. It's a sharp decline, but MySpace has been bleeding users for more than five years, illustrated by Quantcast's estimates below.

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You know I'm an iPad freak. I was first in line to buy one and I've used it so much my screen is cracked. It is the device that's changed my life more than any other in the past year, which, in a year that Microsoft Kinect shipped, is totally impressive. For the past few days I've had a Motorola XOOM. I accepted a loaner because I wanted to prove that it would suck next to an iPad.

One problem: I'm falling in love with it. With a couple of caveats. First, the caveats:

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Yesterday, during an exclusive press briefing that was also available by invitation-only webcast, Sony Electronics president Phil Molyneux detailed how the company would embrace the connected anytime, anywhere and on-anything era. He also addressed, and not necessarily answered, questions about Sony's Internet TV and tablet strategies. If one word defines his plan for the consumer electronics company: Differentiation. I attended the event at Sony Electronics' corporate headquarters in northern San Diego, which is about a 30-minute drive from my apartment. Sony Electronics is the largest of Sony's six US organizations.

Molyneux, a 24-year Sony executive, assumed his current responsibilities just six months ago. During his first two months Molyneux traveled to 15 states, visiting 250 retail stores. He wanted to understand Sony's retail situation in the United States. "You can go pretty much into any retailer in the US and you'll be faced with this wall of LCD TVs. I call that the 'sea of sameness.' From a consumer's perspective, you look at that wall and this line of LCD products...how can you decide which product to purchase?"

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We're pretty confident you know what Xoom is by now. Stories we've run about the upcoming Android 3.0 tablet from Motorola Mobility have been some of the most popular items of the last three months.

Yesterday, just before all the advance reviews were published, law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius filed a trademark suit with the US District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of San Francisco-based money transfer company Xoom Corporation.

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The Android Market has never had any specific ban on carrying and selling straight up text documents, and users could search through the market and find apps that were, in effect, standalone e-books. Now, however, there is a section dedicated specifically to e-books which currently features around 500 titles from publishers such as Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, W.W. Norton and Co., Hachette, and more.

The URL for the site, market.android.com/books, was discovered by Android Guys last week, and the site noted that URLs for /music, and /movies worked and resolved to the Android Market.

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It's new to me, anyway. The Android Developers created video, which posted three days ago, uses maps to show how Google's mobile operating system grew from its release in October 2008 through January 2011. I wonder how an iPhone 4 visualization would compare. Earlier this month, Gartner reported that Android sales increased 888.8 percent year over year in 2010. This video is what that growth looks like. Credit where due, I spotted the video on CoolSmartphone.

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Somewhat hidden in between Apple's announcement Thursday of new MacBook Pro laptops was the debut of a new method of PC connectivity: Thunderbolt. It can be most easily explained as the next generation of FireWire, allowing for transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps.

Those who stand to benefit the most from Thunderbolt would be those in the audio-visual industries, which Intel itself bills the technology as perfect for. "Working with HD media is one of the most demanding things people do with their PCs," Intel's PC Client Group general manager Mooly Eden said. "We've taken the vision of simple, fast transfer of content between PCs and devices, and made it a reality."

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In the race to offer Microsoft Office functionality in the cloud, Google has beaten its rival getting a product out of development beta and into production release. Today Google announced global availability of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, which went into beta late last year. The technology builds off Google acquisition of DocVerse.

Microsoft is working on its own solution, Office 365, which is beta testing and is expected to go v1 sometime this year. For now, Google can claim first to market advantage as it looks to convert more Office users to its cloud services. The cloud is increasingly important to Microsoft. Last year, COO Kevin Turner said that 70 percent of cloud wins are new customers.

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